posted
I am opposed to torture for many reasons, one of which is I am not convinced it would work. I do think that if someone was in the ticking bomb situation and felt like that was the only option, they probably should do it and then turn themselves in for prosecution. With such extreme circumstances, I imagine there will be leniency, but that means the evidence that you had to torture must be concrete and convincing to someone else. And probably, you are going to have to get some useful info or it wouldn't be worth it.
As far as why let thousands die rather then accept torture, I can see that mentality. If you believe that a society permissive to torture is fallen so much that it is not worth living in, better to let those thousands die then condemn millions to live in a reprehensible state.
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: My personal policy is this: torture remains on the books as a major crime, something that is illegal in all cases.
If there is ever a situation in which someone is confident that torturing this one guy will save thousands of lives, they should have no problem with also sacrificing their own freedom for those lives by choosing to commit a crime and suffer the punishment for it.
Exactly. And should it prove that they had indeed saved lives by breaking the law, well presidents have pardoned people for worse.
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As far as why let thousands die rather then accept torture, I can see that mentality. If you believe that a society permissive to torture is fallen so much that it is not worth living in, better to let those thousands die then condemn millions to live in a reprehensible state.
Note that Ted Rall said he'd rather allow an attack to take "millions of lives" than torture someone to stop it.
Anyway, it does seem safest to keep torture illegal, as in practice it's almost guaranteed to occur at a greater frequency than whatever the law allows. There should be leniency if the torture yielded good information; but as it's impossible to prove that torture was necessary, there should probably always be a penalty unless overridden by a pardon. (I've read that this is the law in Israel.) This would also show the world that we don't use extreme measures casually.
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posted
It would depend on the specific circumstances and, likely, on information that a president would have that I would not. There are some presidents that I would trust to grant such a pardon and who would have my endorsement and others that I would not.
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quote:It would depend on the specific circumstances and, likely, on information that a president would have that I would not.
Interesting. So torture isn't something that is wrong in all cases, then? That's not an accusation-it's just not an admission I'd have expected is all.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: There are some presidents that I would trust to grant such a pardon and who would have my endorsement and others that I would not.
How do you feel about Van Buren?
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Would you personally endorse such a pardon in those circumstances?
Generally no.
I don't think it would be consistent for a government to essentially pardon its operatives (and effectively itself?) especially when it seems clear to me that we would have scoffed at claims by Japanese soldiers who tortured allied soldiers at being pardoned by their emperor.
However, I do recognize that realistically, the chances of the US being consistent in this regard and holding international hearings are low to nil.
Therefore, my minimum hope would at least be for a different administration, not complicit in the torture (it is becoming unclear if the Democrats are actually complicit or not due to the Pelosi issue) to conduct proper public trials with full transparency. I think that in many cases, the defence that torture may have saved lives would fall apart under proper scrutiny and that the remaining few cases could be handled in terms of sentencing.
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quote: I don't think it would be consistent for a government to essentially pardon its operatives (and effectively itself?) especially when it seems clear to me that we would have scoffed at claims by Japanese soldiers who tortured allied soldiers at being pardoned by their emperor.
The two situations aren't really analagous at all, Mucus.
On the one hand, we've got factual torture of US PoWs, prisoners in declared wars, taken while in uniform in a theater of conflict, etc., and then as often as not tortured because Japanese military tradition put surrendered soldiers as below the pale as not.
The other, hypothetical case involves a situation wherein an American government employee, be they soldier or spy or bureaucrat, tortures a known terrorist with strong, reliable intelligence that that terrorist knows something about an imminent attack that will kill thousands of civilians, and then actually obtains that information and thus saves those lives.
Equating the two doesn't seem fitting, to me at least.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:...we would have scoffed at claims by Japanese soldiers who tortured allied soldiers at being pardoned by their emperor.
Also, of course, there's the difficulty posed by 'would have 60 years ago' and 'will in the future'.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Also, of course, there's the difficulty posed by 'would have 60 years ago' and 'will in the future'.
Oh, believe me.
If I thought for a moment that the United States had consciously decided to put torture back on the table as a viable practice for all nations and was prepared to treat future foreign torturers as leniently as it is treating its own torturers, then that would indeed take the problem of consistency off the table.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: ... The other, hypothetical case involves a situation wherein an American government employee, be they soldier or spy or bureaucrat, tortures a known terrorist with strong, reliable intelligence that that terrorist knows something about an imminent attack that will kill thousands of civilians, and then actually obtains that information and thus saves those lives.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Even in the hypothetical, it is still American "reliable" intelligence about imminent attacks. How is that hunt for Iraqi WMDs going? And it is still American belief that the person is a known terrorist, like say Maher Arar.
So all we really have in kmbboots' example is an American president informed and convinced by the, ahem, reliability of American intelligence that the person they tortured was in fact a terrorist and that they actually stopped anything, deciding to pardon one of his own for torture.
Bah.
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: ... Equating the two doesn't seem fitting, to me at least.
Seems pretty fitting to me.
Especially in light of irony such as this:
quote:Anami told the other cabinet ministers that, under torture, a captured American B-29 pilot had told his interrogators that the Americans possessed 100 atom bombs and that Tokyo and Kyoto would be bombed "in the next few days"
Arguably the Japanese did have pretty solid intelligence that the US was planning to use weapons of mass destruction on them (not from *torture* mind you) but from other events.
In fact, if torture was actually effective, one could argue that in a world where torture was permissible, in order to save lives they should have started much much sooner.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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quote: If I thought for a moment that the United States had consciously decided to put torture back on the table as a viable practice for all nations and was prepared to treat future foreign torturers as leniently as it is treating its own torturers, then that would indeed take the problem of consistency off the table.
That's not what I was talking about. I was referring to the problem of guiding our current actions by what we would have said of similar actions sixty years ago. That seems a poor standard to me.
quote:So all we really have in kmbboots' example is an American president informed and convinced by the, ahem, reliability of American intelligence deciding to pardon one of his own for torture.
That wasn't quite the question I asked her, either. You're inserting a large amount of uncertainty into my admittedly academic hypothetical question.
quote:Arguably the Japanese did have pretty solid intelligence that the US was planning to use weapons of mass destruction on them (not from *torture* mind you) but from other events.
So you're acknowledging that the situations weren't the same, then?
Also, lemme just register that the contradiction (to put it favorably) you're so disdainful of is hardly an American specialty. I'm not saying you're suggesting it is...just pointing it out. Just because we should be better doesn't necessarily make us worse...and when you're top of the heap with the biggest target, choices and predicaments come to you that don't always come to your neighbors, either.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: That's not what I was talking about. I was referring to the problem of guiding our current actions by what we would have said of similar actions sixty years ago. That seems a poor standard to me.
Well, no. It is not exactly a guide. I think of it more as a par. The US is free to do better and I would certainly hope that it would. The fact that the US superficially seems to be doing worse (as in becoming more approving of torture) would be disturbing if I thought it was indicative of a real change.
quote:That wasn't quite the question I asked her, either.
Oh, then to make it clear, I'm am addressing the hypothetical posed by the exchange that I thought you were addressing here:
quote:Originally posted by kmbboots:
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: ... If there is ever a situation in which someone is confident that torturing this one guy will save thousands of lives, they should have no problem with also sacrificing their own freedom for those lives by choosing to commit a crime and suffer the punishment for it.
Exactly. And should it prove that they had indeed saved lives by breaking the law, well presidents have pardoned people for worse.
i.e. a government operative, perhaps convinced in their own good faith that an attack was imminent and deciding to torture.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
You are misunderstanding me. In my imagined scenario, the consequences of a US operative using torture should be dire in any case. The operative will have in no uncertain terms have broken the law, become a felon, have his or her career as an operative ended and almost certainly face considerable jail time.
On the very slight chance that his actions did, in fact, save hundreds or thousands of lives, he might hope for - not expect - leniency and escape prison.
He had better be right because he is sacrificing a great deal in any case and certainly his freedom as well if there were other ways of getting the information, or the information was false, or anything except the unlikely-to-the-point-of-absurdity hypothetical "ticking bomb" situation that people who want to justify torture posit as an argument.
That is the scenario I was imagining when I suggested the possibility of a presidential pardon.
posted
Conservative radio commentator Mancow Muller: argued on his show that waterboarding wasn't torture. Said that he'd go and get waterboarded in the hopes that reenactment would help prove it. LETS SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHOO
Oh hey let's go back in time for Christopher Hitchens:
quote:Hitchens was asked by Vanity Fair to experience it for himself. In May 2008, Hitchens voluntarily experienced waterboarding, after which he fully changed his opinion. He concluded "if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture."
quote:On the very slight chance that his actions did, in fact, save hundreds or thousands of lives, he might hope for - not expect - leniency and escape prison.
I'm afraid I just don't understand the mentality that refuses torture (I share that particular mentality) but simultaneously thinks there is something unreasonable or unfair about excusing it if it actually works in the worst-case scenario, because then not only will the subject certainly have deserved it, but morality demand it.
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posted
My favorite expert response to the Ticking Bomb scenario...
Using standard interrogation techniques that build rapport between the interrogator and terrorist. The terrorist then offers information that the interrogator is asking about, and even what the interrogator does not ask about, but that the terrorist thinks the interrogator should know.
The enhanced techniques main result is to get information that we do know about.
So if there were two bombs ticking away, but we only know about one, torture would get us the location of that one, we'd stop the torture, and the second bomb would go boom. Using standard interrogation techniques he tells us about the second and we save millions of lives.
If we torture one man to save millions, shouldn't we torture one man to save thousands?
If we torture one man to save thousands, shouldn't we torture ten men to save thousands?
If we torture ten men to save thousands shouldn't we torture a hundred men to save two hundred?
If we torture a hundred of their men to save two hundred of ours shouldn't we torture two hundred of theirs to save a hundred of ours?
Where do we draw the line?
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
Rakeesh, if I understand your question, the difference is the difference between condone and forgive. Nowhere in my scenario do we believe that the torturer's actions were legal or in accordance with US policy or morally right.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
Another odd revelation, not torture but this seems to be the only related thread on the front page.
quote:Bush, who turns 63 in July and was 54 when first sworn into office in 2001, has yet to comment on the reports. They include last week's GQ magazine exposé into the hawkish use of scripture in 2003, when then-defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld forwarded secret intelligence memos to Bush embroidered with biblical passages.
"Therefore, put on the full armour of God," a verse from Ephesians, and "Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter," from Isaiah, are among the messages that adorn reports prepared for Bush by Rumsfeld's Pentagon.
Alright. I already knew this one from the Colbert Report although I wasn't clear which part was satire and which part was real.
quote:Stranger still are new accounts emerging from France describing how former president Jacques Chirac was utterly baffled by a 2003 telephone conversation in which Bush reportedly invoked fanatical Old Testament prophecy – including the Earth-ending battle with forces of evil, Gog and Magog – in his arguments to enlist France in the Coalition of the Willing.
"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins," Bush said to Chirac, according to Thomas Romer, a University of Lausanne theology professor who was later approached by French officials anxious to understand the biblical reference. Romer first revealed his account in a 2007 article for the university review, Allez savoir, which passed largely unnoticed.
posted
Seems distinctly related to Rumsfeld's utterly ridiculous scripturequotin' cover pages.
He was playing to his audience: a president with the febrile intent to play God's Little Chosen Warrior.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Yelm Police Chief Todd Stancil said Joshua Tabor of the Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma, Wash., was arrested on charges he allegedly punished his daughter by holding her head backwards into a sink full of water, the New York Daily News said Monday.
Police allege Tabor, 27, chose the torture technique because his young daughter was scared of water.
Stancil said Tabor, who is facing assault of a child charges, allegedly told authorities he used the technique as many as four times.
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Would you personally endorse such a pardon in those circumstances?
Generally no.
I don't think it would be consistent for a government to essentially pardon its operatives (and effectively itself?) especially when it seems clear to me that we would have scoffed at claims by Japanese soldiers who tortured allied soldiers at being pardoned by their emperor.
However, I do recognize that realistically, the chances of the US being consistent in this regard and holding international hearings are low to nil.
Therefore, my minimum hope would at least be for a different administration, not complicit in the torture (it is becoming unclear if the Democrats are actually complicit or not due to the Pelosi issue) to conduct proper public trials with full transparency. I think that in many cases, the defence that torture may have saved lives would fall apart under proper scrutiny and that the remaining few cases could be handled in terms of sentencing.
Actually, they DID torture, and American soldiers were specifically barred (by OUR government) from suing them/ We made our own soldiers sign waivers of their rights before we shipped them home, and in some cases kept them there for weeks until they agreed under duress.
There was a famous case where the ONE soldier who didn't sign, as he was air lifted out of Japan with a life threatening medical condition. He sued, and won a ton of cash.
My wife has a friend who did her thesis on those war crimes, and our treatment of our own soldiers. She was the granddaughter of one of those POW's who survived the Bataan Death March, and she eventually wrote a book on it.
I will see if Jenni remembers her name, and any details I can find to look up some links later.
posted
I think you misunderstood me. The conviction of Japanese soldiers for torture is factual and assumed. The claim was that the US government would not have accepted a Japanese government pardoning the Japanese soldiers convicted ahead of their trials.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: And this space reserved for when Sean Hannity when he finally goes through with the waterboarding he said he would go through
________________________________________
Hannity welshed on this like a coward, btw
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The British government has decided to pay former detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, tens of millions of dollars in compensation and conduct an independent investigation into its role in the mistreatment of prisoners.
The United States still operates the Guantánamo camp, with no end in sight. None of the truly dangerous terrorists there have been brought to justice, while many prisoners are still held who never should have been. The government not only refuses to come clean on this ignoble history, but it is covering up the Bush administration’s abuses by denying victims a day in court.
quote:It will do no good for this nation’s tarnished human rights reputation that at the same time Britain took responsibility for its comparatively minor role in the ill treatment of terrorism suspects, former President George W. Bush was bragging in a new book that he had personally authorized the repeated use of a form of simulated drowning called waterboarding on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of Sept. 11.
At least someone is owning up to the awful legacy of Mr. Bush’s illegal detention policies.
posted
My step-father joined the Marines, originally he was going to be an Interagationist (or whatever the hell you would cosider this proffession of getting the truth out of people by certain means) however because he had a criminal record they wouldn't let him do it, instead he became an engineer...........
I think they are doing something right my Step-father is well, a very bad choice of interogating people as he might take great leaps and say remove fingernails with pliers.....
So if anyone is being tortured it's obviously not as inhumane as it sounds XD
Tortured itself is well open for criticism on what counts as torture and what doesn't...
Posts: 461 | Registered: Nov 2010
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: I'm so ashamed of my country.
Aha! Now you can never run for political office!
All joking aside, this business with torture is possibly the worst thing my country has done since I was born.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
step one: obviously we did it step two: bush admits he approved it, writes this explicitly in his 'hey remember when I was a terrible president' book step three: ??? step four: nobody is prosecuted lol
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
Anyone feel like, grouping up together and overthrowing the government with me.... in my experience the more people who participate, the more successful it will be expecially without incident.
Posts: 461 | Registered: Nov 2010
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I'm envisioning you staging a one-man rebellion against the federal government in a food court somewhere. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
No more like literally removing members of the government, via grabbing and dragging them out of office, and cramming all of them in a nice cell :D
Posts: 461 | Registered: Nov 2010
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posted
To be honest, if torturing one person would prevent 1,000 American citizens from being killed, I'm for it. Nothing to the extent of shoving bamboo under someone's nails mind you. Playing loud music so they cannot sleep though? Go for it.
Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006
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posted
So you wouldn't shove bamboo under someone's nails to save 1000 people?
How many studies and testimonials from people who know about this stuff will it take to convince people that, not only is torture morally wrong, it doesn't make us safer?
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
I never said I was for torture, but with our government practically everything they do is hidden in fine print in paperwork you have to specifically request for to see, but how do you know to request for it if you never knew it existed.
Posts: 461 | Registered: Nov 2010
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posted
Why American citizens, torturing one person to save 1000 is good enough why are you being a nationalist, a person is still a person American or otherwise >__>
Posts: 461 | Registered: Nov 2010
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quote:Originally posted by Geraine: To be honest, if torturing one person would prevent 1,000 American citizens from being killed, I'm for it. Nothing to the extent of shoving bamboo under someone's nails mind you. Playing loud music so they cannot sleep though? Go for it.
The problem is that there is no way to know in advance whether torturing one person will save 1000 lives, cost 1000 lives or have no outcome except causing the suffering of one person. You can never no the outcome in advance. That's why we should always eschew torture, always, no exceptions.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
Actually you could be able to know some information from the target, whom then witholds the rest knowing you can't touch him/her.
Posts: 461 | Registered: Nov 2010
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posted
There are two common methods of interrogating a prisoner.
1) Using current psychological science, befriend the villain, get them to doubt their self, and they will surrender the information.
2) Threaten them with pain. Inflict pain to insure they understand the threat is real. Repeat until they talk.
Way number 1 works. The information given is more complete, more honest, and more actionable. Often the prisoner leaves as a spy working for you.
Some complain that it takes too long, but it seems the bigger problem people have with it is that it pampers the bad guy.
Way number 2 does not work. People give the information they think you want to hear. It increases resistance to working for the heroes and usually results in partial information being stripped from the villain.
Some complain that it is faster, for those emergency ticking bomb situations, but when we had to Water Board the one guy 60+ times, it doesn't seem faster to me.
Seems to me that where its illegal to make those terrorist #@$@#$@#$@# pay with a painful punishment, if we can humiliate and beat the @#$@#$@# out of them in the name of interrogation, well a lot of people are all for that.
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Feb 2003
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